


what's worth saving (is never worth letting go to waste)

by iceberry



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s15e20 Carry On, Gen, Grieving Sam Winchester, Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), is dean technically a jr lol, sam praying to jack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:41:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27640856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iceberry/pseuds/iceberry
Summary: The house really starts to feel like home for Sam when he goes back to the Bunker for the first time since the birth of his son, back to the first place he ever really stayed long enough to think of as home and a place he thought he’d never be able to spend time in again without being crushed by the history of the place and the absence it’s defined by.Life’s weird like that, Sam thinks as he slides the key out of its engraved box and locks the door behind himself.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 41





	what's worth saving (is never worth letting go to waste)

**Author's Note:**

> un-beta'd for Now, i went insane and wrote this in one sitting lol.
> 
> not a fix-it-fic, not an entirely linear narrative, but generally set about 2 months & 4-5 years after dean's death

In the end, they settle on a small house outside Emporia. Dean’s two - and though Sam loves him with his entire heart, is absolutely living up to the _terrible_ moniker - by the time they finally stop going for shitty rentals and Amber’s full-time librarian salary with whatever Sam manages to scrape together on the side is enough to pay a mortgage. The house is… it’s normal. It has a finished basement and linoleum bathroom floors that haven’t been updated since the 1980s and cabinets that they know will need to be replaced, but it’s _normal_. There’s windows. Sam’s grateful, _so_ grateful, that Amber knows enough to not look at him strangely when he asks her to take Dean and keep the real estate agent outside for a second; he scans the place for EMF and feels a tightness in his chest loosen up when not a single light blinks red.

She jokes that he just likes the town because it’s where they started dating and because he’ll always be a Kansas boy, and maybe that’s true, but it’s also three-and-a-half hours away from the bunker, just in case, and an hour and a half from Lawrence. And maybe Lawrence was never really his home, not in the way it was his older brother’s, but there’s something about being near there that… feels comfortable. Feels safe.

The house starts to feel like it really _belongs_ to them the second they open the boxes that are filled with four years worth of books and stare at the shelves they built for their bedroom and laugh at how they don’t have enough space, not nearly enough room for all of their books. But the house really starts to feel like _home_ for Sam when he goes back to the Bunker for the first time since the birth of his son, back to the first place he ever really stayed long enough to think of as _home_ and a place he thought he’d never be able to spend time in again without being crushed by the history of the place and the absence it’s defined by. 

_Life’s weird like that_ , Sam thinks as he slides the key out of its engraved box and locks the door behind himself.

◎

He first goes back to the Bunker about two months after he takes care of the werewolf case in Austin, after the single machete he brought with him on what was supposed to be a solo vamp hunt got broken in two by a headless body when it turned out to be a nachzeher. Turning the lights back on is strange, but - _I guess I knew I wasn’t ever going to be done with this place_ , he thinks, and takes a deep breath and walks down the stairs. Miracle bounces down the stairs behind him, claws clicking on the metal staircase, and then runs down the hall ahead of him when they reach the bottom, barking tail wagging. 

“Fuck,” Sam mutters, and he follows Miracle even though he knows exactly where the dog is going. He hears the whining before he catches up to where the dog is pacing in front of Dean’s room, walking back and forth with his tail between his legs and shooting occasionally panicked looks into the empty room, then back at Sam.

“I know bud, I know,” Sam says, and crosses over into the threshold of Dean’s room. It’s still, it’s _way_ too still, and too quiet without a record playing loud enough that Sam could hear all the way from the library. He sits on the edge of Dean's still half-made bed, and reaches out to scratch behind Miracle’s ears in a daze when the dog comes up to him. He doesn’t cry. Part of him wishes he could, part of him wants to, but he thinks that he’s cried out for the moment. He stays there for a few minutes, making an effort not to look at anything in particular. Every time he notices a detail ( _the Bob Seger vinyl still on the record player, a half-empty bottle of whiskey in the corner, a flannel he hadn’t worn in years because of bloodstains but refused to throw out no matter how many times Sam asked him to balled up on the top of the dresser_ ) the loss is too much to really wrap his head around. 

Sam sits there, staring distantly at the brick wall in front of him, fingers carding loosely through Miracle’s fur until he’s jolted out of the rhythm by the buzz of his phone in his back pocket.

“Hey, Jody,” he says when he sees her name on the screen, and doesn’t try to put pep back in his voice, because she knows. She calls him at least once a week, and he knows that Patience and Claire and Alex have called him at least once each because she asked them to check in on him. He appreciates it. It makes him feel a little less alone. Because he’s lost family before, plenty of times, but to lose Dean ( _again and this time for real this time he’s not coming back_ ) and Jack and Cas so _fast_ -

“Hey Sam. How you holdin’ up?” Jody’s voice snaps him out of his train of thought, which he’s grateful for.

“You know,” Sam says, hoping that that’s enough and she does know. “I’m dealing. Staying busy. Just got back to Lebanon for the first time since…” He trails off, and he can hear her giving him space before she starts talking again.

“Say, so that actually works out well,” Jody starts, as Sam stands up with one final ruffle of Miracle’s fur. “Listen, Claire and Kaia are hunting this weird, Egyptian ghoul-like thing.”

“A Jakkal, yeah,” Sam says, and stands by the door until Miracle walks out, head hanging down. He closes it behind them and starts walking away. “We ran into a few of those in Indiana a few years ago.” _We_.

“Right - well, she needs a gold blade, and we have one of course, but I loaned it to Donna ‘cause she thought she might’ve had a banshee. Any chance Claire could swing by and pick one up? It would be a big help, and she could be down there and out of your hair before dinner.”

“Yeah, of course,” Sam says, and turns towards the armory. He glances down at Miracle, wondering if maybe he shouldn’t let a dog who only listens to his commands half of the time because his brother wouldn’t actually sit down and learn how to train a dog into the weapons room. But the dog still looks so sad, and is staying so close to Sam, he knows that he’d just sit in the hallway and cry if he wasn’t let in.

He looks at the weapons rack, scanning the rows of knives until he finds a gold one that looks like it would be a good size for Claire. “Hey, Jody?” Miracle lays down on the floor next to his feet with a contented huff.

“Yeah?”

“Think I could trust you with a key to this place?”

◎

He’s not “out of the life.” But for the first time, he’s not really sure he _has_ to be entirely out. Maybe it’s because for the first time in over a decade it feels like the _choice_ is there. Not just running away from it, pretending it’s not his problem anymore, an _actual_ choice. He could hang up his boots if he wanted to. He still thinks he might, sometimes. 

The cases he takes on now are lighter and infrequent, maybe once or twice a month at most - a werewolf here, a djinn there. Demons have barely been an issue since Rowena took over, but he passes the stray possession and larger monster situations to Jody and Donna but mostly to Claire, who’s _easily_ the best hunter in the mid-west right now. _(Just like Dean_ , he thinks, when he realizes her age. He thinks both of them would consider it a compliment.)

He doesn’t drive the Impala anymore, not even when he goes on cases. Sam bought a shitty used Civic about a month after he met Amber, fixed it up himself. He thinks Dean would make fun of him for having a Honda, but would probably be proud of the work he did on it, because it (as his brother would say) “runs like a dream.” Amber thinks it’s funny when he shows her the false bottom he built into the trunk, points out that this car is probably better for hiding an arsenal of supernatural weapons than the Impala, and he lets himself smile at that, fights back the urge to defend Dean’s car from any slight, no matter how small.

It starts when he realizes a witch in Oklahoma would be much easier to take care of with a tracking spell, but that it’s hard to do a tracking spell when the closest thing you have to spell components are a spice rack in your kitchen and baby powder. The only thing he’s really needed to restock on are bullets, and he can get those from Bobby and Eileen or Jody without going back to the bunker.

He started going back there less and less as he had copies of the key made for a few trusted hunters - people know who to call if they need something from the bunker fast, and it’s not Sam. But… the storage rooms are an entirely different beast, one Sam doesn’t pass a key on for. Cas, with his preternatural memory, was the only one who knew where things were quite as well as Sam did. And given that some of the shit in that room is dangerous if mishandled at best and straight up deadly at worst.... _It would be irresponsible to send someone else in_ , he thinks with a sigh.

So early on a Saturday morning he throws a cardboard box into the back of the Civic, leaves Miracle sleeping on the floor outside of Dean’s bedroom, and drives to Lebanon.

It’s _heavy_ , walking back inside. The door creaks open with the same sound it always did, and it’s a melancholy tone now. It doesn’t sound like home.

He switches on the lights at the top of the stairs, grateful that no other hunters seem to be stopping through right now. The soft thud of his boots echoes around the room, and he freezes at the bottom of the stairs. It’s hard to be here. It’s hard, of course, because Dean’s room is right around the corner, exactly the way it was when they left for Canton - one of the few bedrooms kept locked, off-limits for hunters stopping through. But there’s so much _else_ here, that he’d… not forgotten, he could never forget, but had pushed out of his mind.

There’s bloodstains on the concrete, where the Apocalypse World hunters who had trusted him had laid on the ground, screaming, a nightmare he still wakes up from sometimes. There’s _more_ bloodstains in the library, even tougher to scrub out of wood than out of cement. How many people had died in that room while they lived there? Kevin, Ketch, Toni Bevell - it’s an incomplete list. He remembers scrubbing hydrogen peroxide into the grain of the wood with a brush that must have been a bunker original until his knees were bruised and Cas had gently told him it wasn’t worth it. He runs his fingers over the names on the table. He can’t help it - he lingers on _D.W._ a little longer, but looks around with a smile when his fingers brush over _JACK_.

“Hey Jack,” he says quietly, to the library, to Jack. He prays at home, but he doesn’t call out to Him by name there. “I miss you, kiddo. I know you see us, but I keep wishing Dean could meet you. He gets so excited when I tell him he has an older brother.” He lets that hang in the air for a second, then smiles at the table. “I know you’re hands-off, not big into the ‘signs’ thing, but I know you’re looking out for us.”

He doesn’t linger too much longer before he goes off to get what he needs.

◎

Amber’s first reaction when she looks in the box is to widen her eyes, look back up at Sam with an eyebrow raised, and walk away muttering something about getting some _extra_ child-proof locks for the cabinet that it’s going in. He laughs at that, because he _has_ to, it’s the only thing that makes sense. He lives in a suburban neighborhood with a kid and a dog and he’s just arrived back with a box full of magic items and his wife is worried about the toddler getting into them.

There’s an empty cabinet in the kitchen above the fridge that he knows isn’t a great place to permanently store magical items, but he carefully unpacks the hundred-year old jars and gold bowls and places them up there, and dutifully puts on the child-safe lock his wife hands him even though he’s the only one who can reach up there. At the bottom of the box are a few of Rowena’s journals, which he takes upstairs and places in the bedside drawer next to his bed. He’s not sure how practical the magic written in any of them will be for his purposes, he didn’t look through them when he picked them up. They’re more for comfort than anything else, which he knows is a strange thing to say about journals belonging to the Queen of Hell, but they feel familiar to Sam in a way the rest of the house still doesn’t.

“Where’d you go?” Dean asks him when Sam scoops him up into his arms, home just after his son’s woken up from his afternoon nap. He brushes some hair out of his eyes - _I should give him a haircut_ , he thinks idly - and smiles at the toddler, who’s still waking up.

“I went back to a place that used to be daddy’s home,” Sam says, and walks out into the hallway with Dean still in his arms. There’s framed pictures on the wall, another feature of the house that just feels so surreally _normal_ to Sam, even after all this time living outside the bunker. He points to one. “It used to be daddy’s brother’s home too,” he says. He knows Dean is too young to know the difference between a house and a home, but he hopes more than anything that he grows up taking having one for granted. “Do you remember what daddy’s brother’s name is?”

“Dean,” the toddler says, smiling and pulling at Sam’s ear, clearly more interested in that than the photo he’s being shown.

Sam kisses him on the cheek, holds him a little tighter. “That’s right. That’s right, Dean.”

◎

Sam brings in another box from the later that night, once the dishes are cleaned up and Dean is down for the night after three readings of the same picture book. It’s one about cars, and though it seems like Dean’s taken after his father quite a bit, sometimes he can see flashes of his uncle in that smile. 

He opens the box on the kitchen table, and lifts the record player out with more reverence than if it was the holiest item in the bunker’s collection. It might as well be. The Bob Seger record is no longer sitting on the spindle, but is tucked safely away in its sleeve, on top of the pile of records he’d also grabbed out of Dean’s room before leaving the bunker. 

“That your brother’s?” Amber asks, leaning against the doorway without crossing the threshhold, intuitively giving him his space. Sam nods in reply, quickly blinking away tears. “You want me to leave you to it?”

“For now,” Sam says, and gives her a grateful smile. “I’ll be upstairs in a bit?” She gives him a sympathetic look, then walks upstairs, and Sam can hear Miracle following her, and then the sound of the shower starting. 

He looks down at the box of records and flips through the titles he’d grabbed, sniffling a bit, laughing a bit more. Dean never updated his cassette tape set when they settled in the bunker, just bought the same records on vinyl; represses if he wanted to splurge with their newest fake card or whatever he could find at used record stores in towns they were driving through. _There’s more back there_ , he thinks, and the idea of having to return doesn’t seem quite as painful anymore.

“Greatest hits of mullet rock,” he says under his breath as he holds up a Metallica record, and though the tears don’t stop, he can’t seem to get rid of his smile either. 

**Author's Note:**

> i! loved! carry on! is that a hot take? maybe based on some reactions ive seen! but certain details were kinda skimmed over, like sam leaving the bunker but not leaving hunting right away? i imagined that being a much more gradual thing, and kinda tried to explore him growing away from that that within this fic while also thinking about the bunker as a place thats carried so much grief for him.
> 
> full support to everyone who wants sam to be married to eileen but definitely didn't feel like that was the right ending for Her, thanks to sophie for helping me come up with amber in like 2 minutes flat bc i wanna keep writing her maybe? title from theseus by the oh hellos!
> 
> twitter is @tube_ebooks


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